


A Werewolf Problem In Northern Arizona

by axolotlsGambit



Category: Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale)
Genre: F/F, Threats of Violence, Werewolves, What If Everyone Was A Werewolf Though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 07:42:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5039815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/axolotlsGambit/pseuds/axolotlsGambit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Red runs into another wolf on the way to Grandmother's Place, and finds that the hunter she's trying to escape might have gotten there first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Werewolf Problem In Northern Arizona

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hanzawa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hanzawa/gifts).



_When everything else has gone wrong, you can always go to Grandmother's Place._

At least, that was what Red had heard the last time she was in a pack; when that fell apart, the other survivors had fled north, and she'd come down from the mountains to hang around dyke bars and listen to awful dance music. It wasn't just wolves who knew about Grandmother's Place, either; maybe it was just wolves who _understood_ , but whoever Grandmother was, she was apparently kind to all animals, and more besides. She'd heard about Grandmother's Place most recently from Luce, who was a wannabe, but a really cute wannabe who could lay down a hell of a bass line. Red had failed Luce --- had failed the whole band, really, but had especially failed Luce, because when the hunter came... Well. Fortunately, the fucker had a sliver of ethics, since when silver didn't scar her he let her go, but. That meant it was time for Red to get the fuck out ot Tucson, and since she didn't have anywhere else to go, she punched "Grandmother's Place" into Yelp and got an address in Sedona. Good enough.

Four thousand feet of elevation gain is rough on an 80s El Camino at the best of times, and Red hadn't really prioritized the car at all. The open back was great for getting fresh air while sleeping, the passenger seat fit her guitar nicely, and no one cares if a beat-up half-truck is parked in the lot of a national park for a few days. Actually driving anywhere other than a grocery store, Luce's place for practice, or downtown to open for some real band doing a halfassed test show before going to Los Angeles --- who needed to do that? Not Red. And good luck finding a mechanic who wouldn't ask about all the fur. 

But as much as she hated change, Red knew that when a hunter settles in to an area, they almost always pick off mostly lone wolves, maybe a straggler from a pack that the pack wanted to eject anyway. (Many coyotes will take down a javalina without any difficulty; a lone coyote best flee. Red'd never met a coyote, but what smaller predator would want a wolf to know they were in her territory?) The first couple times someone'd come through, she lurked and waited, because she didn't have any commitments to anyone. But pack finds itself, no matter how much she wanted to stay alone, and now she had the band, and they were just a bunch of furry kids who didn't know what they were getting into. She couldn't stay with them, and she wouldn't turn them, but she could at least draw some of the heat away by getting the fuck out of town, so: Sedona.

She'd heard "Oh you have to visit Sedona, it's so beautiful," and "Oh you have a connection to the mystic you've got to get up and see the vortices" for years, and after all the buildup the drive there was... anticlimactic. Yes, the pine forest was gorgeous, it was like being in the upper parts of the Rincons, and the open road was nice, but in full skin-and-clothes and an enclosed vehicle it didn't feel much more exciting than driving down city streets. Climbing the steeper hills as newer cars zoomed past her felt a lot like running uphill on only two legs: the knowledge that her best was trivial to beat for someone else. At least when it came to running, that she had the potential to be the someone else for. Driving? Cars cost money. 

Something felt wrong as soon as she turned onto Sedona's main street, on which the internet had said she'd find Grandmother's Place. Until the turn, she'd felt more or less at home --- sure, there were some gas stations and the occasional bank but it felt like the desert, the buildings blended in, the sky was bigger than everything else. The main street was trying to be Vegas but failing, shitty barbecue places stacked on top of each other and fighting for space with the worst kind of kitsch. She parked the car on a side street and loped through throngs of tourists, all of them giving her an instinctive wide berth as she kept her fists balled up in her jacket pockets. No, she did not want a tarot reading from a human. No, she did not want "healing crystals" with all the energy sucked out of them already. No, she did not want prickly pear ice cream. (Well, maybe later.)

She walked through the flimsy fake-wood saloon doors into Grandmother's Place, and walked up to the counter, sitting on a torn red pleather stool and doing her absolute best to ignore whatever awful crooner was playing over tinny old speakers. She breathed in deep through her nose --- coffee. Overcooked meat. Stale coffee. Someone in the corner who really should have showered after that hike. A few layers of stale wolf, too, like someone'd been in and out, but either they hadn't been in a while or they'd taken some care to disguise their scent. Their? Her, most likely, although relying on scent to determine that was... risky. She ordered a coffee, and it had that perfect slightly burned diner coffee flavor to it. It warmed her, and the taste was strong enough that she didn't notice the other wolf had returned until they sat down a few stools over. 

Red held her mug in both hands and looked over at the other wolf. Long, scraggly black hair cascading down a loose black Gore-Tex jacket --- stolen? Intentionally too large so it doesn't rip with slight transformation? Concealing a weapon? Jeans, nothing in the back pockets, worn-out hiking boots that didn't show any sign of deformation from feet stretching out into paws. Black leather bag to the right side of the stool, putting it further away from Red, big enough to hold a change of clothes and some essentials, hands shaking as they pulled a couple of dollars out of their pocket. Horribly chipped red nail polish? Red shook her head. You learn very quickly not to bother with nail polish, claws are one of the harder things to control. She doesn't look like she has incredible control, so...

"Are you looking for Grandmother, too?," Red asked, leaning over slightly. "Because I don't think she's here."

The other wolf turned to look at Red, breathing a bit quickly; she had a jagged, fresh scar down her right cheekbone. "She's not. And I was. And she's gone. So you should probably leave." 

Red put down her coffee and held her hands out, palms up. "Hey, hey, it's okay, it's cool. I'm not packed either, and I'm in a bit of a pinch too. Maybe we can have some coffee, take a walk, talk about it? Looks like you had a close call recently, and---"

The jacket puffed outward a bit as she growled, claws flexing slightly out of the ruined polish. "There's a hunter. Here. You should leave."

Red took a deep breath and let her ears out under the hood of her jacket, swiveling them around, and then shook her head, her ears settling back into human place. "I don't think the hunter's here right now, and you don't need to be afraid of me. Wolf Shall Never Kill Wolf, you know how it goes." She pursed her lips. "I think you know how it goes. Are you... new?" 

She grabbed out for Red's coffee mug, a long swipe down the counter that Red only had time to lean back from, and drained the coffee. "I am new, and you should be afraid of me. I don't know what you're even talking about."

Red pressed the toes of her right shoe firmly into the diner tile, in case she had to leap back, but kept her palms up. "It's... my phrasing's a reference to an old Shibuya-kei track but the point is pretty much all of us watch out for each other. Even rival packs don't really go for blood really, they just squabble over who gets to piss on which trees and confuse the hell out of wildlife sanctuaries. So." The other wolf was holding the mug with both hands, squeezing. "So if the whole Grandmother thing is a myth, maybe I can..."

"Not a myth. Up the road a few miles toward Flagstaff, turn off at Shady Lane, walk the west fork path and then start climbing down the canyon. It's in the canyon wall. Bring flowers. Don't expect to be safe there." 

"I don't expect to be safe anywhere," Red said, bristling a little bit. "And I knew to bring flowers. They're in the back of the car. Are you coming? Do you want a ride?" She shook her head. "Look, lemme just..." Red grabbed a napkin and wrote her name and phone number on it, and slid it over. "If you change your mind, call me, okay? You got a cell phone in your bag of tricks over there?"

"Cat." She took the napkin and shoved it in a pocket. "You'll wish you hadn't met me. And Red? With the hood? Do you think you're funny?"

Red stared Cat down for a long minute, neither of them blinking, and then hopped off the stool, tossing a couple of dollars onto the counter to pay for her coffee. "I do. And really, call me." 

\---

Red folded her jacket, shirt, and slacks up carefully into a small bag, which she wrapped around her shoulders and chest. She took a deep breath, fur in reds and tans sprouting from her shoulders and hips to spread across her entire body, covered only by black friction tape wrapped around her ankles, hands, and the bottoms of her feet. Her legs stretched out and then condensed down as she dropped to all fours,  
her face contorting into a wolf's head. She panted lightly, stretching out her limbs and wagging her tail, and then picked up a bundle of flowering ocotillo branches in her teeth. Confident they were secure with their thorns pointed outward, she started bounding down the canyon face, leaping from rock projection to rock projection, friction tape helping her keep steady running at thirty-degree angles down the wall. When she found a wilted pile --- all datura, of course --- she stopped, dropped the ocotillo bundle on top of the wrinkled white flowers, and pulled herself up onto her hind legs, keeping her elongated feet, thick fur, and wolf's head, though her mouth curled into a broad smile.

She let her claws out, their neatly filed arcs catching the moonlight, and climbed up into Grandmother's cave, ears perked up. "Oh Grandmother," she called out, "what subtle signage you have!" She heard her voice echo down the cavern --- it must have been fairly deep --- and she heard rustling. As her eyes adjusted, she saw dim light, so she walked toward it, slowly, the friction tape bending around loose gravel. "I could hardly find the place, and some puppy told me I shouldn't come even once I did. Maybe you met her? She called herself Cat?" That got a deep growl resonating through the cavern, and Red dropped into a crouch, dropping her bag beside her. 

"What a deep voice you have, Grandmother," Red called back, digging out her phone with her left paw while keeping the right extended. "All the better to scare bats away with?" She poked at the phone, claws clacking against the screen, and keeping her right paw out and clawed focused on her left paw, shifting it to a hand, so she could operate the touchscreen. The initial light showed the roof of the cave, textured lumps of dark blue in the phone's glow, and then she turned on the flashlight. She saw... nothing, just cave, which looked to end around . She sniffed the air, hackles raisied. It smelled like cave. Why wasn't there any wolf? She didn't even smell anyone distant --- why wouldn't it --- 

"All the better to deceive you with," came Cat's voice from behind her, and she whirled around to see the other wolf pointing a long gun at her. "I don't know why I ever used to bother traveling to hunt, this is so much easier."

"The flowers---"

"Block out scents, yes. And the cave blocks out noise. I'm not sure why the last bitch thought this was a defensible position, all I had to do was smoke her out."

Red kept her body as still as she could, storing energy in her legs, right paw very slowly pulling back toward her, claws pointed toward Cat. "You... you're the hunter I've been running from? How long have you---"

"It doesn't matter." 

Red's ears twitched. "No, seriously, do you even know what you're... did Grandmother wolf you oh my fucking stars! You don't... Are you seriously planning to keep hunting?"

Cat took a step forward, fur starting to bristle across her face. "Haven't decided, but I don't see why not. There's no way I'd join a pack," she said, disdain filling her voice. "I'll just off myself if the urges get too strong."

Red's shoulders relaxed a little bit. "The... urges? You've gotta be shitting me." She slowly put her phone down, and retracted her claws. "You realize that's mostly a myth, right? Like, " 

Cat did not lower her weapon, but wolf ears pushed out of her hair, swiveling slightly forward. "You're just bargaining for your life at this point. Why should I believe you?"

"I'll admit that I'm biased at the moment." Red leaned back, releasing the tension in her legs, and sat down. "But if you had silver bullets you'd've fired by now, so how about instead of a fight we have a conversation, and if you still want to fight later, we can do that." She held her paws up open again, and this time Cat lowered the weapon a bit, still pointing it at her. "You don't have to join a pack. I haven't been in a pack for at least a decade. I know folks who never did it. There's, like, werewolf lesbian separatists if you're into that. I could introduce you to some folks."

The fur faded from Cat's face and she blinked. "But what about the moon and the cycles and... I assumed in a week I would just lose control of myself and wake up subservient to..."

"So, that might happen to you if you're not careful, since you're not even in control of your transformations yet and it's true that the hormones can kinda fuck you up. But I'm sure you've dealt with hormones before, and if you're around friends, they can help you. It's just like..." Red ran a paw through her hair. "It's a lot like puberty, I guess. You get used to it but it sure helps if your parents actually tell you what the hell's going on." She laughed. "Although I guess in this metaphor you killed your mother so. That's a thing."

Cat's wolf ears folded back and she growled a bit, raising the gun again. "I was chasing a loner dog who thought Grandmother could help him. She couldn't, and I got him, but then she knew what I was doing, so. Even when I smoked her out, she was crafty, and she got a bite in. I guess she thought it was funny. I do not find it funny." Her growl grew louder. "I do not find it funny! I'm going to die a fucking monster, or worse, live like one."

"Monstrousness is what we do, not who we are. I'm not a monster. I play the guitar in a band full of cute girls in animal costumes who think I'm really good at makeup, and sometimes I'll bring down a deer in a national park where no one's gonna give a shit. Occasionally I'll meet up with a pack and argue territory, but mostly we passive-aggressively piss on rocks and argue on Twitter when any of us remember to charge our phones. I'm not a monster. You don't have to be a monster." Red stood up, slowly, and took a step toward Cat. "It would help you not be a monster if you put the gun down. Do you think you can do that? Okay. Good. Let's talk."

Cat leaned against the cave wall, panting a bit, fur covering her arms and face in spotches. "I'm going to get caught and killed, anyway. I can't control the changes like you can. I just. Wear trenchcoats everywhere like some sort of horrible Matrix wannabe and hope no one pays too much attention to my face. It won't last." Her claws dug into the rock, the scrabbling sound echoing through the cave. "How do you do it?"

Red leaned against the wall next to her, folding her arms behind her head. "Practice. Self-control. Sing a good song inside your head and think wolfy or non-wolfy thoughts, depending. There's packs that teach specific skills but you could probably figure it out with just a little help." She sniffed the air. The moonflowers still blocked out a lot, but she could taste a little of her adrenaline and a hint of Cat's fear. Cat was holding back her panic pretty well, other than the shifting; when Red turned she spent weeks running around the woods killing things and howling. "You're already doing better than you think you are."

Cat stilled, and slowly she shifted back to fully human, claws in the rock turning to fingernails, skin smoothing out, ears sinking down her head. "Would you help me?"

Red put her paw on one of Cat's hands, and squeezed. Another paw squeezed back.

\---

 _When everything else has gone wrong, you can always go to Grandmother's Place._ Recently Luce had heard that there were _two_ grandmothers now, both wolves, bonded to each other but not to a pack. Luce just hoped they'd help her even though her animal spirit didn't manifest physically like the wolves' did; but surely if they'd helped Red, they'd help her...

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I took this in kind of an odd direction but. I had this image of the Red Riding Hood story influencing wolf culture as an archetype that wolves would approach with varying levels of irony, and ran with it, and this fell out. I hope you enjoy! <3


End file.
